Sunday, November 8, 2009

November 8th is Intersex Solidarity Day. In honor of the day please make the commitment to educate yourself about intersexuality and to promote intersex activism to others.

I'd also like to encourage this post to be about what it means to stand in solidarity with the intersex community, whether you are intersex or not, what we can do to be advocates and allies?

Other topics for possible discussion as suggested by the official Intersex Solidarity Day are The life of Herculine Barbin, intersex "normalization" treatments without consent, the violence of the binary sex and gender system, the sexism implicit within the binary construct of sex and gender.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I think there are no comments here because so few people know what being Intersexed is. I am intersexed so I'll introduce us. We are people whose bodies are in between male and female. We have physical characteristics of both sexes in some way or to some degree. We are not rare. One in every 200 people has something that fits this description. One in every 2,000 people are born with ambiguous genitals and/or organs. We have no civil rights and parts of the medical profession still advocate genital mutilating surgery in early childhood that is suposed to make us look more male or female but in reality creates terrible scars, numb genitals, incontinence and those who have fertility that doesn't match the sex "assigned" to them loose it to the knife. Those who this has happened to have grown up to protest the practice but have made little progress. Those of us who weren't mutilated are happy. Most of us have man or woman identities, some of us have switched from the sex "assigned" to one we feel fits us better. A few of us don't feel comfortable living as if we're either sex and long for a time when intersex is it's own sex.

There isn't actually an intersex community. There are a few places where a few intersexed people have found each other. For the most part we only find each other online. Before the internet most of us had never knowingly met another person like us in our lives. Isolation is one of the persecutions we've suffered. Our parents were lie to, often told that we were so rare that they could never find other parents of children like us. We have a very long way to go.

Anonymous, thanks for pointing out some facts! Facts are what is needed in speaking about intersex. Fictions about intersex of many and various kinds have been used as their substitute for far too long.

am an intersex from uganda and i have faced all types of discrimination to the point that i have used lies about my sexual indenty to feel more accepted in the society. there are times i have felt so abnormal that i have tried to end my life. to see this, it is an inspiration to go with life nowing that there are some people out there who are like me.i hope one day i can be strong enough to shout out that am intersex. bravo to this web site.